Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari argue in their book A Thousand Plateaus that human identity is rhizomatic. Unlike trees, rhizomes are mutable and always in flux. A rhizome spreads in ever-unorganized directions, with no fixed hierarchy or origin. Likewise, human identity is scattered across interests, desires, and attributes. The new documentary series Scav, directed by Adam Chase, represents the University of Chicago at its most rhizomatic.
Scav documents the 2025 Scavenger Hunt. Known as Scav for short, it is one of the largest scavenger hunts in the world. The documentary follows three teams from different UChicago dorms and is structured semi-chronologically in five episodes. Teams compete to complete as many items on the Scav list as possible, with items varying in point values. While the first episode of Scav is available on YouTube, new episodes air on Nebula every Wednesday from November 5 to December 10.
Like many competition shows—including Jet Lag: The Game for which Chase is best known—Scav is primarily focused on its characters. In an interview with the Maroon, Chase argued that while the competition can drive suspense and interest across episodes, “the episodes are really about these people and the experiences that they’re having… because the competition itself is strange and diffuse.”
That strangeness is not a bug but a feature. Scav and its participants, known as Scavvies, revel in their rhizomaticity. The “diffuse” nature of the competition pulls its participants in a million directions. Scav shows a competition with no fixed point of origin and no clear author. Rather, it is a co-authored group project where the main product, upon first glance, seems to be nothing more than sleep deprivation for both its competitors and documentarians.
Every year, the hunt is a four-day extravaganza of maximalist weirdness. The activities students engage in to earn points include taxidermying a mouse, trying to blow up a car, performing excerpts of Simone de Beauvoir’s writing as an interpretive dance, and playing “It’s Raining Men” by The Weather Girls on a recorder. Scav judges and competitors do not subscribe to normal human limits of rationality when designing or completing items. They embrace the rhizomatic freedom to follow their scavenging whims as far as they can.
Just as people can be spread out and mutable, so can universities. No documentary can adequately represent the identity of one person, let alone the identity of an entire school or its student body. Scav does not attempt to represent the non-Scavving members of the University of Chicago community. As Chase said, “When we show people who are not really Scavving, their purpose in the story is to provide context for the people who are Scavving.”
Scav tells this objectively strange story with the caffeinated energy of its participants. An early screening of the first episode on November 2 at the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts Screening Room, attended by many competitors from last year’s competition, repeatedly erupted in laughter. Humor is frequently derived from the edit itself. For example, a scene where Max Palevsky Residential Commons Resident Dean Jason Riggle states that the item involving blowing up a car could not refer to a real car cuts directly to the judge who wrote the item saying he wanted Scavvies to blow up a real car.
Juxtaposition does not only serve to produce humor, however. Intercutting between teams with strong levels of participation and Snell-Hitchcock Hall’s team, which seemed entirely lacking in competitors during the Thursday of 2025 Scav, served to further emphasize the difficulty of the situation faced by Snell-Hitchcock Hall’s captains. It is impossible not to feel for them as they commit to doing something with all their hearts, only to find that they are alone in doing so. However, just as people change, so do circumstances. The first episode ends with life being breathed into the Snell-Hitchcock Hall’s team with new members present and doing what else but laughing at lewd puns off the word compass. The nature of these puns will be left as an exercise for the reader. Community through crudeness—what could be more rhizomatic than that?
